I’ve been fortunate to interview Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly, twin astronauts, many times over the years. Both are honest, funny, trustworthy, wry, and usually the smartest guys in the room.

Scott Kelly recently launched to the International Space Station (ISS) for a one-year stay, which is longer than any other American astronaut. (His last stay, for six months, set another record.)

Mark Kelly, now retired as an astronaut, will remain on terra firma. When he’s not advising aerospace startups, lobbying for gun control or spending time with his wife, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Mark is contributing to what is known as the Twin Study… NASA’s detailed (and highly personal) attempt to understand what happens to the human body over long-term exposures in microgravity.

Find the interview here. As always, it was a delight, a learning experience, and a hoot to talk to these most impressive twins.

The daughter of two computer scientists, Dr Cynthia Breazeal once aspired to become an astronaut. Then she discovered social robotics, deemed it “much cooler” than space and set out to “humanise technology so that it’s warm, not beeping at you, and treats you like a human being”. Enter Jibo, the MIT professor’s latest robot: intended for families, Jibo is currently priced for pre-ordering at around the price of an iPad. (Jibo, Inc. raised $25.3m in Series A funding earlier this year). Jibo is also intended as a platform for developers to create social robot apps. With its streamlined, sleek design, price point and its nascent app marketplace, Jibo could very well do for consumer robotics what the iPhone did for mobile phones. Here, Dr. Breazeal holds forth on how insect intelligence led her to eschew space robotics and why she refuses to let her house “feel like the Starship Enterprise”.

Greetings, friends. I’m really happy to share this interview with you, as Sangeeta Bhatia, MD, PhD is one of the seminal minds in science today. She combines an engineer’s mind with medical expertise to craft solutions for some of the human body’s most pressing issues. In our hour-long interview, we touched on a number of her projects, from melting sugar to create blood vessels… to creating “micro” livers… to her new paper test for cancer. I was also intrigued by her stance on whether women in S.T.E.M. should be expected to mentor each other. Read on here.